Re: [IAEP] Sunflower for Science on XO
Hi Danny, Vincent Povrik created a Sugar-specific version of Wine. The .xo bundle and other information are available at http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine. You could use his bundle as a starting point for packaging your program. What toolkit does your software use for its user interface? I don't recognize the widgets, but if it's already Windows/Mac I wonder how hard a true Linux port would be. Best, -Wade On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Danny Kodicek da...@sunflowerlearning.com wrote: Hi there I just wanted to write to let people know we've been experimenting with some success with getting our Sunflower for Science product (www.sunflowerlearning.com) running on an XO. It's a Windows/Mac product but I've got it running through SugaredWine and it's looking very promising. I have a few questions that I wondered if anyone might be able to help with: 1) Screen resolution The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two big problems, one of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and one of performance. Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen animations, some of them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that resolution. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For example, I've been thinking about whether we could run the software at half-res and then use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen 2) Launching and packaging Although SugaredWine is great, it would seem that a more sensible option would be to package the software together with Wine as a single activity that can be launched directly from a stick or installed as a .xo. Our product doesn't have an installer, although it does write to the Registry - anyone tried anything like this? I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be welcome, but if you could talk to me like a small child that would be very helpful :) Thanks Danny ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sunflower for Science on XO
On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 09:50, Danny Kodicek da...@sunflowerlearning.com wrote: Hi, Tomeu, thanks for your reply 1) Screen resolution The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two big problems, one of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and one of performance. Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen animations, some of them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that resolution. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For example, I've been thinking about whether we could run the software at half-res and then use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen That approach has been discussed and I think that someone got it to work up to some point, I recommend you to search in the de...@lists.laptop.org archives for the keyword scaling, zoom, etc. I'm cc'ing that list in the hope that someone will reply. Thanks for that, it's very helpful. I did some searching as you suggested and it seems that this is a very commonly recognised issue, with lots of discussion but no real solutions. It did seem that several people have been calling for the XO to have a screen resolution switch option, which would certainly be the simplest solution from our point of view. There was a mention of a particular driver which apparently fixes the issue but hasn't been included in any Sugar builds - anyone know anything about that? There is no such thing as Sugar builds. Sugar is a set of software components that people such as OLPC and Sugar on a Stick take and distribute on top of a linux distribution. Questions specific to the XO are better asked to the OLPC community. On the same subject, we've also found that running in 16bit display mode is a serious issue for any of our content that uses 3d. Is there any way to cheat the display to think it's 32bit instead? I think you can draw to either 16bit or 32bit surfaces, then the X system will convert them to whatever it's using internally. But I have no idea how you would do that in win32 and/or wine. I recommend you to make an .xo that contains both wine and you binary, when the activity is launched, wine would be called with your binary as an argument. I think there was a good example running around some time ago, which did just that with an excel viewer or similar. That's kind of what I was aiming for, yes - if anyone could point me to that example or any others that would be a big help. Maybe this could help? http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-April/005128.html Regards, Tomeu I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be welcome, but if you could talk to me like a small child that would be very helpful :) Sorry I cannot give you more precise instructions, I'm really short of time these days. I would suggest you to google around, patiently ask here and in other fora, and go step by step towards your goal, learning on the way. That's what small children do, right? :p Unfortunately I don't have quite as much time as the average small child to build up my muscles - there's a chance we might be piloting the software in a number of schools very soon and so I'm really trying to get up to speed quickly! I'm a fast learner, but I find learning about Linux in general and Sugar in particular to be like picking up sand - it's very hard to find info that doesn't already assume a lot of prior knowledge. But as I say, even little bits of help are very gratefully received! In particular, just nods in the right direction make a big difference - your tip above was very helpful indeed. Thanks Danny -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sunflower for Science on XO
On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 17:16, Danny Kodicek da...@sunflowerlearning.com wrote: Hi there I just wanted to write to let people know we've been experimenting with some success with getting our Sunflower for Science product (www.sunflowerlearning.com) running on an XO. It's a Windows/Mac product but I've got it running through SugaredWine and it's looking very promising. I have a few questions that I wondered if anyone might be able to help with: 1) Screen resolution The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two big problems, one of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and one of performance. Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen animations, some of them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that resolution. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For example, I've been thinking about whether we could run the software at half-res and then use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen That approach has been discussed and I think that someone got it to work up to some point, I recommend you to search in the de...@lists.laptop.org archives for the keyword scaling, zoom, etc. I'm cc'ing that list in the hope that someone will reply. 2) Launching and packaging Although SugaredWine is great, it would seem that a more sensible option would be to package the software together with Wine as a single activity that can be launched directly from a stick or installed as a .xo. Our product doesn't have an installer, although it does write to the Registry - anyone tried anything like this? I recommend you to make an .xo that contains both wine and you binary, when the activity is launched, wine would be called with your binary as an argument. I think there was a good example running around some time ago, which did just that with an excel viewer or similar. I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be welcome, but if you could talk to me like a small child that would be very helpful :) Sorry I cannot give you more precise instructions, I'm really short of time these days. I would suggest you to google around, patiently ask here and in other fora, and go step by step towards your goal, learning on the way. That's what small children do, right? :p Regards and good luck, Tomeu Thanks Danny ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- «Sugar Labs is anyone who participates in improving and using Sugar. What Sugar Labs does is determined by the participants.» - David Farning ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sunflower for Science on XO
Hi there I just wanted to write to let people know we've been experimenting with some success with getting our Sunflower for Science product (www.sunflowerlearning.com) running on an XO. It's a Windows/Mac product but I've got it running through SugaredWine and it's looking very promising. I have a few questions that I wondered if anyone might be able to help with: 1) Screen resolution The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two big problems, one of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and one of performance. Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen animations, some of them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that resolution. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For example, I've been thinking about whether we could run the software at half-res and then use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen 2) Launching and packaging Although SugaredWine is great, it would seem that a more sensible option would be to package the software together with Wine as a single activity that can be launched directly from a stick or installed as a .xo. Our product doesn't have an installer, although it does write to the Registry - anyone tried anything like this? I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be welcome, but if you could talk to me like a small child that would be very helpful :) Thanks Danny ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep